As they stepped out of the carriage, Nicholson first, Lenox looked up. The houses looked familiar to him, for some reason, not just because they belonged to the rest of the very fine structures along Portland Place, but these two or three houses specifically.

Had he been to a supper here recently, a ball?

Then he realized why he recognized the houses, and stopped, chilled—for unless he was much mistaken, the body of Thomas Jenkins was lying in front of the house of the Marquess of Wakefield. The seventh name on Lenox’s list.

CHAPTER SIX

The person in charge of the crime scene in Nicholson’s absence was a florid, overweight, and overwhelmed young sergeant named Armbruster. He met them on the pavement, a thick sheaf of papers clamped tightly under his arm. “The newspapers have arrived,” he reported to Nicholson, “and I have sent out for hot soup.”

“This is Sergeant Armbruster,” said Nicholson, introducing Lenox. “He was in charge of the scene when I arrived, first man on the spot, which means he’s been here for hours—stout fellow, Armbruster, well done. Hot soup, though?”

“All the men are cold and—and hungry, very hungry indeed.” From its rather desperate tone, this latter assessment seemed as if it might apply more to Armbruster than any of his constables. “To lift the spirits, Inspector. We have been working past the clock for some time now. I myself am accustomed to having my supper very prompt.”

“Yes, well, fine. Is the wagon ready to go?”

Armbruster looked unsettled—the wagon had absolutely nothing to do with soup—and took a moment to register the question before saying, “Yes, sir.”

Nicholson turned to Lenox. “The scene is yours. Take the time you properly need, but work quickly, if you could. I would like to cause as little commotion here as possible, particularly with the journalists arriving, and the wagon is ready to take Jenkins’s body to the morgue.”

As Nicholson said this, Lenox and McConnell were gazing upon a roped-off section of the pavement, where a white sheet covered a low-lying lump. It was two or three feet from the house—not Wakefield’s house, in fact, but the one directly next to it.

Lenox was still scarcely master of his emotions. “To whom does this house belong?” he asked.

Nicholson drew his own notebook out and flipped its pages. “John Clitheroe,” he said. “Forty-two. A merchant from Northumberland. Unmarried.”

“The house is dark and the lower windows barred, I observe.”

“He is away for six months upon business, sir,” said Armbruster. “In the Caribbean.”

Nicholson looked at the sergeant. “The canvass has returned, then? Lenox, as you can imagine we sent out several constables to ask about the house.”

“Yes, sir. No witnesses, sir, no, though we knocked on every door we could. Unfortunately we’re so close to the park that there’s not as much foot traffic here.”

That might have been true on a normal evening, but now there were getting on for fifty people, perhaps even more, crowding in on them. “Disperse this crowd, Armbruster.”

“But the soup will be arriving any moment, sir,” said Armbruster.

“I don’t give a damn about the soup.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Neither should you.”

“No, sir, certainly not, sir,” said Armbruster, though there was a hint of rebellion in his face. He did give a damn about the soup. Lenox wondered if Armbruster had known Jenkins, or if the inspector was only a name to him. The Yard was a large place, when one began to count all the constables and sergeants. There was no reason this fellow should know the kind of man—for Lenox still believed in Jenkins—that had been lost.

“Thomas, would you rather look at the body here or in the morgue?” asked Lenox.

“I might give it a cursory look here, and a more extensive one there,” said McConnell. His hands were in his pockets. He shook his head. “I find it hard to believe Jenkins is under that sheet.”

“Then let us inspect his body together first, after which I can look around the area for myself,” said Lenox. “Nicholson, have you removed the effects from his person, his pockets?”

“Yes. They’re in a box in my carriage. You’re free to examine them at your leisure. For my own part I could not see very much in them—the normal things a man would carry.”

“A notebook?”

“No, none.”

Lenox and McConnell ducked under the rope—Nicholson having nodded them past the large constable manning it—and approached the body. Off to their left Armbruster was actually doing a fairly effective job of dispersing the crowd, though Lenox knew that at least a dozen of them would remain until every scrap of evidence had been carried off and the last black cloak of the Yard was gone.

“Do you know whose house this is?” Lenox murmured to McConnell as they came to stand near the body.

“John Clitheroe, forty-two, Northumberland merchant, unmarried. Or has that sergeant got it wrong?”

“No, the next one.” Lenox jerked his chin. “There.”

“Whose?”

“William Travers-George.”

“Oh. Oh!” McConnell looked at Lenox in surprise. “Wakef—”

“Yes, but keep your voice down, please. We can discuss it later.”

Wakefield.

Lenox considered the name even as he moved about the scene. The blackmailer Hughes was of relatively gentle birth, while Parson Williams the impostor had been an orphan; both were of equally negligible origin, however, beside William Travers-George, the 15th Marquess of Wakefield. The title was among the highest in the land, outside of the royal family. Among nonroyals, only a duke was permitted to enter a room before him. On top of that the Wakefield marquessate was one of the oldest in England, bestowed first to a particularly loyal treasurer of Elizabeth the First in the 1580s, a lineage that meant that of the thirty-five marquesses in Great Britain (there were hundreds of earls, by contrast) Travers-George outranked all but two.

The family had extensive lands in Yorkshire, and of course Hatting Hall was theirs, which some people considered the most beautiful of all Hawksmoor’s country houses. As if these credentials weren’t enough to guarantee his respectability, William Travers-George’s father had been a kindly, beloved old soul, rarely away from Hatting, and William Travers-George’s son and heir, who per tradition borrowed the honorary title of the Earl of Calder, was a mild-mannered student at Cambridge. On either side of him, in other words, were decent men. There was no indication of madness or malice anywhere in the family line. Travers-George was biographically unimpeachable.

Yet Lenox doubted strongly that there was a man capable of greater evil currently alive in England.

McConnell bent down over the body, whispering to Lenox, “Should Nicholson arrest him?”

“No,” murmured Lenox, bending down as well. “Not yet anyhow, certainly not.”

They positioned their bodies so that they were as much between Jenkins’s body and the crowd as they might be, and then McConnell pulled back the sheet.

Both men were silent at what they saw, for it was he; it was Inspector Thomas Jenkins. There was a small round hole at his temple, but otherwise his face looked composed, almost Roman. He had been a handsome man.

“It is the pity of the world his life should have ended this way,” said McConnell.

“I hope he didn’t feel any pain.”

McConnell shook his head. “He wouldn’t have, no. It would have been instantaneous.”

They had examined enough corpses in tandem that they were able to work in silence. McConnell studied first the head and then the neck of the body, loosening the tie Jenkins had been wearing and giving particular attention to the eyes, shining a light in them. “No response, the pupils constricted. It has been longer than ninety minutes. I suppose we knew that. Rigor mortis is setting in quickly.”